‘From the Cold Case of Audra Owen’s’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

From the Cold Case of Audra Owens

1) Photograph of the Body
Her lashes collect dew in small droplets and dare the pollinators to land, on her increased forehead, on her stiff nose half-broken, and drink from her. The flies already had—they laid their eggs in her open mouth because it was safe and still. Long whisps of light hair braid around wildflower weeds, licking leaves from the ground and snatching them from the wind. She’s rotting. Her eyes are half-gone, returned to the flies and the dirt to be reborn as wheat, as peach trees, as raccoons splattered on asphalt. I can’t help but look at this photo with a strange appreciation for the scenery. At least he left her with a view, away from the highway we assume lit the night of her death in a drowning yellow light. At least it’s a peaceful place to die, if not a peaceful death: the wind, the harmony of passing cars, and stars. Poor girl. Poor girl.

2) Photograph of the Scene
She’d been out there, in an overgrown field only cared for by people with big-running dogs and prisoners on community service, for two days before someone found her. Lace from the edge of Audra’s dress braces a fresh robin’s nest on the branches of a nearby tree. Mud obscures the pale blue satin of her shoes, but the scuffs from nights of dancing on gravel roads expose the dark rubber from the soles. A dried pool of blood oozes in the sun, drying into a sticky puddle of evidence with drag marks of four limbs, a body, and two heeled shoes. It settles under a buck, fit, with crushed ribs, a bullet hole in the leg, and exposed meats and fats where the proud head should be. The trail leads from a parked blue two-door with a crushed front hood, smeared with the same sticky black tar that glued the buck to the earth. Footprints walk off into the grasses, away from the highway, along a thinner trail of blood droplets. Someone is alive, burning clothes we’ll never see, washing blood we’ll never test, and walking through grocery store cameras we’ll never watch. A girl doesn’t just die on the side of
the road, except that she does. This scene haunts me with its silence, tranquility and decay dancing around what used to be a girl. Birds sing their mating songs in the trees that soak up the deer’s blood and the rotting soup of her body before we collect it, and though she is gone, she is never gone from that place. She remains there, nebulous in nature, with only a wooden cross and plastic flower to mark that she’s ever been here at all.

3) Interview With Martin Owens

Recording Officer: Detective Elenora Ruiz
Subject: Martin Owens
Transcriptionist: Therese W. Abbott

E.R.: Recording start. June 1st, 20XX. Detective Ruiz, sitting down with Martin Owens, father of the victim, Audra Owens.

M.O.: I’m sorry—do y’all want something to drink? I don’t know how to host anything. That’s all my wife but she ain’t around to do it no more. I’d offer y’all a beer but—

E.R. No one would expect you to host anyone right now, Mr. Martin.

M.O.: You’d be surprised—so many people coming by. Sick of all these casseroles and lasagna.

E.R.: I just have some questions about Audra.

M.O.: I hope so. Isn’t that your job?

E.R.: What can you tell me about her?

M.O.: She’s a good girl. Always has been. I’m lucky. Never have to worry about her. She always comes home on time, you know what I’m saying? Studying environmental biology or something—like public parks, researching type stuff. A good girl. A real good girl.

E.R.: Did she have any friends? A boyfriend? Anyone that she didn’t get along with?

M.O.: No boys, I don’t think. She’s got a girl from school she hangs out with—Hannah or Hallie or something. Should be in her phone. I know y’all found that in her car. Bought that car for her,
you know. For her sixteenth birthday she asked for a little more freedom. I obliged the best I could. She still tells me where she’s going every time she leaves so I don’t worry.

E.R.: Would she have been out with anyone

E.R.: It’s possible. Its rare that these kinds of crimes—

M.O.: What kind of crimes?

*fan whirring*

E.R.: Mr. Owens—

M.O.: Listen, sweetheart. You might see Audra as just another girl on your long list of girls, but I’ll tell you right now. You don’t go comparing my girl to anybody else. That’s my girl. All she
wants to do is help. Animals, people—everything. And now she’s dead.

E.R.: I’m sorry, Mr. Owens. I didn’t mean to imply anything. She’s just...Audra deserves justice for what happened to her. I just want to learn everything I can.

M.O.: No—no I know what y’all do. You’re just like the assholes that keep showing up at my door. You’re going to look busy, go asking questions to people who don’t know anything, and
close up shop the minute you actually have to do some thinking. Everybody shows up when its convenient, like they actually care, but most of y’all just want to look like y’all care. Bringing
fucking lasagnas. I want to trust that you’re doing everything you can, Detective, but I’ve seen y’all fuck up more than once. And you aren’t going to do that to my girl.

*fan whirring*

M.O.: I’ll get you everything I can from her school—schedules and notes and whatever. But don’t take anything out of her room unless you’ve got good reason. I’m leaving it exactly as it is. It’s what Audra’s mother would want. She’s sentimental like that.

E.R.: Where is Audra’s mother?

M.O.: Dead. Where else? Seems like that’s all we do lately. Died of cancer in 20XX. Audra was fifteen. She got cheated of a mom, and now she’s gotten cheated of a future. This ain’t supposed
to happen.

E.R.: No, it’s not.

4) Evidence List
A pale silver bracelet with a rabbit charm. From what I gather from Mr. Owens, Audra is a pacifist in every aspect of her life. She just wants to study, tend to her father, and avoid the light of attention like it would burn her. I can relate. If I wasn’t a cop, I’d be a nudist. I’d be out on a compound somewhere off grid, my skin one with the land and my mind divorced from all semblance of society. I’d eat mushrooms and berries, make love with whatever other free-loving, empty-headed human body I can find, and never think again. When I search pawnshops on other cases for guns, knives, wedding rings, and whatever else people sell to hide, I’m afraid I’ll find Audra’s bracelet there. It’s a cute bracelet. Someone would buy it in an instant, on sale, of course.

Audra’s purse and wallet on the passenger seat of her car: IDs from the State of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, headphones, receipts for vegetarian taco bowls and
charged lemonades, pink nude lipstick, watermelon Jolly Ranchers, and absolutely nothing of use. There’s nothing more to note about it other than it wasn’t stolen. All the things that show the
world exactly who she is are useless after she’s dead. Nobody knows that she kept a picture of her childhood cow, Ulysses, tucked into her sunshade mirror. Her headstone isn’t painted with dreams of the great National Parks of the country where she should’ve studied the migration patterns of reintroduced wolves or hibernating snails or wildfires. She never has pacifiers in her
pockets or reading glasses in a tortoise shell case. Instead, the purse and wallet are returned to Martin Owens and left to do with what he wishes.

The car itself, a blue two-door with her father’s name cosigned on the loan, found abandoned on the shoulder of a decently busy road with a smashed front right headlight and a smear of fur
and blood. It’s a classic scenario, really: girl driving home at night when the headlights catch the glint of a pair of panicked eyes just a second too late. She’s lucky the torso and head don’t
shatter the windshield and crush her against the seat. The buck staggers a few feet, spins in a circle, cries, and collapses under the weight of its mortality. A headless deer. A bullet in a leg. Someone must’ve shot it and that’s why it took off running. A shattered nose, a muddy dress, and a handful of hair, and a cracked skull. The creature isn’t bleeding much except for the slim stream from the back left thigh and a puddle from its mouth where it bit through its tongue. Everything inside the animal must be broken to kill it.

5) Persons of Interest

Martin Owens. Relationship: Father

He didn’t murder his daughter. I’m certain of that. He’s a retired plumber, spent the prime of his youth in crawlspaces wrapping duct-tape around the pipes of other people who didn’t do their jobs right. He lives in a small house he paid for with his sweat and labor with a maple tree in the back and two empty beds in the locked rooms of his family. He sleeps on the couch, drinks coffee with sugar, and never recovers.

Halle Buddinger. Relationship: Friend

Halle is just another girl on a long list of girls that could end up dead at any moment. Her face is made for missing persons’ posters, smiling obituaries that say she lights up every room
she walks into, and funeral GoFundMes. She wears her hair in a low ponytail with a purple velvet scrunchy. Her purse looks like a button mushroom. She’s alive, alive, alive. But she could
so easily be dead and it could be Audra sitting in front of me for an interview. Her name could be Brittney, Jessica, Ann, Rebecca, Laura, Elizabeth, or a dozen other names and identities all
variegated by their occupations, ethnicities, hobbies, and habits. But instead, it’s Halle, a girl that shared Audra’s Literature of Ecoterrorism class, and she knows nothing useful.

“We read a book about elephant and giraffe poaching in class,” Halle says in the interrogation room. “And we used to joke about becoming those, like, African poacher poachers. Just going out there with our guns and firing them up like a shooting squad. It was one of the only things that ever got her riled up.”

Halle, suddenly remembering where she is and who I am, stops herself after the thought escapes her lips with wide eyes. “Not that we’d actually do it. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t talk like that at a police station. She just cared a lot about animals.”

“We think she might’ve hit a deer on her drive home that night.”

Halle put her hands to her face, truly horrified in the way only pretty young girls destined for death can. “Oh god, that would’ve killed her. Seeing an animal like that? And that’s what she
sees before some fucking monster kills her? God.”

“It was headless.”

“Oh my god. Did she hit it that hard?”

“No, it was more like it was...cut off. You don’t think Audra would have anything to do with that?”

Halle blinks. “That’s a weird question, but no. She was a complete animal empath, you know? She hated hunting and taxidermy and stuff. Definitely wouldn’t have decapitated an animal she hit with her car. What would she even do with it?”

And then she walks out. Halle melts into the crowd of people on the street outside the station. She gets a DUI when she’s thirty-six and disappears into the obscurity of normal life. I’m
happy for her. She’s so damn lucky.

Unknown Assailant. Relationship: Murderer

The only thing we know and will probably ever know about this person is a combo of vague science and conjecture. The hair we found in her hand says he’s a man; he’s not in the
criminal system, and unless he fucks up royally or does a 23&Me, he’ll never be in the database for investigators of the future to identify. He’s a hunter; the circumstances make sense for a
nighttime hunter that spooks his prize and sends the buck off towards the highway, in which it gets hit by Audra’s car and jeopardizes his night of fun. I can imagine it like it happens in front
of me: cool night winds, angry voices reflected in the eyes of a dead deer, a swift crack in the face with the butt of a rifle, another in the back of the head as Audra falls, a trophy buck on a
wall of a cabin stained in the blood of an innocent girl.

But that’s all it is, isn’t it? Science. Conjecture. There’s no name, no address, no justice. Her case lives in the back of a storage facility, waiting for an intern to upload it to an online
archive so the people in charge can downsize. Death is cannibalistic. People die all the time for stupid reasons and I’m supposed to sever myself from the images and go eat steak and potatoes
like nothing happened. There might be one or two that sink their teeth into me, but they’ll go cold like the others. People don’t have clean-cut endings.

Case Notes from Eleanor Ruiz
It's always happening in the present. They’re never dead, never a was but always an is, and it plagues me. They die, but they never stay dead. They animate in deep storage, moaning
and crying, and sometimes just sitting, a spirit in the way all dead girls are. The face changes, the injuries slide between minor to obliteration, but today—it’s Audra. She’s sitting on the floor of
my bathroom. Audra’s hands bury in mud where my tiles split and she watches an inchworm work its way across her knee. Her face is shattered like a mirror from the nose outward, blooming towards the crack in her skull. I flick the lights on and off, but she sits there, staring near me but never at me. For a moment she’s Halle with her throat slit, then my niece with a gunshot in her chest, then a horrific stitched experiment of every dead girl I’ve ever seen in the files. Then Audra’s back, my current face into the darkness, and she waits for me to say something.

I spit toothpaste in the sink and shrug.

“It never ends, does it?”

When she opens her mouth, all she speaks is static.

Leah Skay received her BA in Writing from Ithaca College. She's a proud alum of the Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program that returned to the States with a renewed vigor for writing pieces that challenge her. She has been honored and published in various online and print publications including Iron Horse Literary Review, Progenitor, Rowayat, Poets Choice Free Spirit, and more.